{"id":670082,"date":"2026-05-14T09:13:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T09:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/670082\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T09:13:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T09:13:08","slug":"why-are-we-getting-more-not-less-var-football-will-not-kill-its-golden-goose-video-assistant-referees-vars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/670082\/","title":{"rendered":"Why are we getting more, not less, VAR? Football will not kill its golden goose | Video assistant referees (VARs)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cJust keep delaying,\u201d Darren England tells the referee, Chris Kavanagh, at West Ham<\/a> on Sunday afternoon. The title is on the line, possibly relegation too, and as replay after replay queues up on the tape machine, who could blame a humble video assistant for wanting to savour the moment?<\/p>\n

To survey it from all the relevant angles, consider all contingencies. To feel the sensation of all that awesome power at his fingertips. They\u2019re calling it the most important VAR review in Premier League<\/a> history. Stuart Attwell, you\u2019ll never sing that.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you want to see it at full speed?\u201d the replay operator asks him. Of course he does. You may as well ask a man whether he fancies an extra spoonful of grated parmesan on his carbonara. And so they watch Pablo\u2019s foul on David Raya<\/a> again. And again. And again. \u201cGo back to the second angle you showed me,\u201d England urges. \u201cGive us a split screen. That one, and then the first angle.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact only two minutes and 35 seconds elapse between the ball crossing the Arsenal goalline and England pushing the large red button on his desk and sending Kavanagh to the replay screen for a final review. But it\u2019s possible to cram a lot of action into those 155 seconds, if you know what you\u2019re doing. Kavanagh goes to the screen and \u2013 not wanting to miss out on the fun \u2013 watches 17 replays of the incident, while England sensually murmurs into his ear exactly what he should be looking at. Eventually, with what appears to be a certain reluctance, the climax. Foul. No goal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One thing you may not know about the Premier League\u2019s VAR team at Stockley Park is that they watch the game in silence. Ostensibly this is a concentration aid, minimising distractions and dispassionately protecting them from the influence of crowd noise. But when you think about it, it means the officials in the control room are watching an entirely different kind of game to virtually everyone else on the planet.<\/p>\n

Not only that, but this weird, sanitised football-scented product is about as far removed from the actual job of in-person refereeing as it is possible to imagine. The art of refereeing a football match is above all the art of context: judging the ebb and flow, sensing where tempers are beginning to fray, managing potential flashpoints before they occur, handling the mood of the players and the crowd.<\/p>\n

Gabriel Magalh\u00e3es and Callum Wilson wait for the outcome of the fateful VAR check at the London Stadium. Photograph: Jacques Feeney\/Offside\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Perhaps this context inevitably generates its own human biases. But then refereeing has always been an inherently subjective business. Football is a sport that has always run on tacit consensus as much as the strict letter of its 17 brief laws. Not every throw-in will be taken from the precise spot the ball crossed the line. Not every shirt-pull will be penalised. Not every yellow-card foul in the second minute will earn a yellow card. This is the unspoken compact that has governed the sport since its earliest days, at virtually all levels.<\/p>\n

The point here is not to argue that West Ham\u2019s late equaliser on Sunday should have been allowed, or that the VAR team acted beyond their authority, or that a quick decision is preferable to a correct one. On the contrary, those four minutes of waiting on Sunday were perhaps some of the most dramatic minutes of this season\u2019s campaign: infinitely more watchable than anything Wolves, for example, have produced with an actual football.<\/p>\n

In a way, this is the problem. Everyone here did the job they were paid to do. West Ham pushed the laws to the limit in an attempt to score, Arsenal pushed the laws to the limit in an attempt to stop them, the officials followed the established protocols, the broadcasters milked the occasion for everything it was worth, the amateur pundits on the sidelines fumed and emoted in all the most predictable ways. And this was the upshot: the basic category farce of some men in a room watching a patently obvious thing on a screen, over and over again, until the constituent elements had long been stripped of any meaning, a blur of colours and shapes and flying limbs scrutinised to the point of absurdity.<\/p>\n

A couple of days later, on Match Officials Mic\u2019d Up, Howard Webb was beaming with pride<\/a> at how his brave lads had courageously seized the moment. \u201cIt takes a bit of time,\u201d he admitted, \u201cbecause they\u2019re going through a process diligently. Because they really respect the game.\u201d To listen to Webb, the chief of Professional Game Match Officials, is to be left with the impression that his team of champions \u2013 men with names such as Simon and Michael \u2013 are the everyday heroes of the game, Stockley Park\u2019s unsung codebreakers.<\/p>\n

Arsenal fans celebrate in the away end at the London Stadium after the decision to rule out West Ham\u2019s leveller. Photograph: Daniel Hambury\/EPA<\/p>\n

This was always going to be the major problem with parcelling off refereeing into some grandiose, quasi-governmental realm. Bodies devoted to officiating will never seriously argue for less officiating. The solution will always be more legislation and not less, more technology and not less, more explanation, more decisions, more work for more hands. And above all a belief in the sanctity of refereeing as an end in itself, rather than, you know, the annoying but necessary minimum layer of bureaucracy required for this multibillion-pound sporting product to function.<\/p>\n

According to a Football Supporters\u2019 Association survey, 76% of Premier League fans want VAR scrapped, while only 3% believe it has made football better. (VAR is, of course, not used in the EFL.) And yet at this summer\u2019s World Cup VAR will not be curtailed but extended<\/a>, this time to cover second yellow cards and corner kicks. The Premier League is expected to opt out of the latter move for fear of angering broadcasters.<\/p>\n

Why have the game\u2019s authorities moved in a direction that so few of its fans appear to want? On some level, there is a sense that the vitriol and abuse generated by controversial decisions are largely priced in, that because fans are ultimately irrational actors there is little point in trying to placate them. Far better, surely, to lurch wholesale in the pursuit of as many correct decisions as possible, whatever that means, and by whatever means.<\/p>\n

Almost a decade after the introduction of VAR, it has disfigured the game to the point where its abolition would be dangerously disruptive. We no longer really know what a handball is, or the acceptable quantum of contact in the penalty area, or when an assistant should flag a potential offside and when not. The muscle memory of these decisions \u2013 for decades enforced by custom and precedent \u2013 has largely been delegated to technology.<\/p>\n

But of course there are harder commercial forces at work. Endless interruptions have formalised the mid-match stoppage, softening the ground for the in-play advertisement breaks that will be introduced at the World Cup this summer. Beyond this there is the fact that VAR simply generates too much spume and passion, too much sweet secondary content, too many television debates and seething newspaper columns, too much Webb standing sternly in a studio, like a gameshow host about to hand out \u00a325,000 to a nurse from Solihull. Why would football kill a golden goose like this?<\/p>\n

Take the average interminable VAR stoppage, whether at the London Stadium on Sunday or any other ground on any other weekend. You\u2019re frustrated, you\u2019re exasperated, you\u2019re angry, you\u2019re screaming, but above all you\u2019re still watching. The minutes are ticking, the pitchside adverts are still rolling, the social engagement is off the charts, and from a crude bottom-line perspective, does anything else really matter? \u201cJust keep delaying,\u201d England tells Kavanagh, secure in the knowledge that he has the audience in the palm of his hand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cJust keep delaying,\u201d Darren England tells the referee, Chris Kavanagh, at West Ham on Sunday afternoon. The title…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":670083,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-670082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=670082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/670083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=670082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=670082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=670082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}